Data from the Centers for Disease Control shows, as of Jan. 1, only about 40% of pregnant women have been vaccinated against COVID-19.

A new study out of Scotland is shining a much larger light on the benefits and safety of getting vaccinated while pregnant.  

More pregnant mothers are weighing whether to get the vaccine, especially with the surging omicron variant.

"I didn't want to get it and potentially harm my baby but looking back, that doesn't really make any sense because I obviously wouldn't have wanted to get COVID with the baby," Heaven Taylor-Wynn said. 

Doctors are trying to convince their pregnant patients to get the vaccine because they are seeing rough outcomes in some unvaccinated pregnant women and their babies. 

"I felt like there was a herd of elephants on my chest, and I couldn't breathe," Ashley Duque said.

"I've seen women they got really bad preeclampsia and a funny variant of preeclampsia called help syndrome that makes them very, very, very sick and requires urgent delivery," said Dr. Brad Holbrook, maternal fetal medicine specialist at Community Medical Center.

"I've seen women with stillbirths. I've seen babies die after they were born," she added.

The study out of Scotland confirms everything doctors like Holbrook have been saying,

The Scotland team studied all women who were pregnant or became pregnant from December 2020 through October 2021. 

"They looked at the entire population of the whole country and because they have a whole, you know, an integrated system," Dr. Holbrook said. "They have 130,000 women in this study that essentially showed the same things, which is that, that women who get COVID are potentially in for some problems. So women who get COVID are more likely to have a pre-term delivery, a stillbirth complication with baby or with their pregnancy, and that women who are vaccinated and then get sick with COVID are very likely to have a much more mild course, so it really just confirmed everything that we've seen."

Among unvaccinated women, the study found they made up 77.4% of COVID infections. They accounted for 90.9% of cases that required hospitalization or critical care, and all 450 fetal and newborn deaths associated with the virus. The rate of deaths in babies after 28 weeks was much higher in women who got COVID-19 within a month of giving birth.  

"The risk of getting infected is pretty high, and the risks involved in being vaccinated are almost nonexistent," said Dr. Alisa Kachikis, assistant professor of maternal fetal medicine at University of Washington.

"I do feel like when I can sit down and talk with them face-to-face about it, look, you know, I'm not representing a drug company," Dr. Holbook said. "I'm not representing the government. I'm just representing the science and what I've read and understand about this and my own experience and based on that and what I've seen, I've seen a lot of complications from COVID."

The highly-transmissible omicron variant brings new concerns, especially in places just starting to experience the surge, like Montana.

"We're gonna have this big bunch of pregnant women come in really sick with COVID and not just pregnant women, unpregnant people as well coming into the hospital, and the hospital is gonna be totally full and understaffed," Dr. Holbrook said. "It's gonna be a very difficult couple of weeks, I think."

This story was originally reported on Newsy.com.

Roughly 18,000 pregnant women across the U.S. have been hospitalized because of COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and that includes a Florida woman who had to have an early delivery when her health started to deteriorate.

The last 10 days felt like months for Robert Hartman as he watched his pregnant wife Chelsea Hartman fight for her life.

"When your wife is with your daughter inside her and having issues breathing, it's scary," Hartman said. "She just started [to have] body aches and chills."

The couple found out they were expecting in January -- at that time the CDC was not recommending the vaccine for pregnant women, and Chelsea had her own concerns.

"She was skeptical about [the vaccine] because there wasn't enough research on the effects of a growing baby and a mother that's growing a baby inside her," Hartman said.

This week, the CDC suggested pregnant women get a COVID-19 vaccine in wake of the delta variant and the surge in cases.

Chelsea Harman landed in the ER with COVID-19 Aug. 2.

"It was [a] very scary 24 hours because they continued to increase her oxygen because her O2SAT was falling," Hartman said. "They did a chest X-ray, they confirmed that she had COVID pneumonia."

"I found out I was a father from sitting at my kitchen island," Hartman said. "So much of the experience was gone of seeing [our newborn] when she's brought into the world and being there, holding my wife's hand."

Chelsea and her newborn showed a glimmer of hope Wednesday when they were pulled off the tubes and able to breathe on their own. As new parents, the Hartmans met their new baby through a video call.

"What I learned in this is my wife is loved and there's still an unbelievable amount of great people that have offered time and support throughout this," Hartman said.

The Hartmans have received overwhelming support through a GoFundMe.

As Chelsea continues to recover, her husband says she will likely need physical, speech and respiratory therapy. The earliest the baby can leave the hospital is at 36 weeks.

Watch the video above for the full story.